Wanderlust (41 page)

Dominic and I are close and companionable. Together in a new place, we spend almost all of our nonworking hours together. We walk the length of the city together. When we go out motorcycling, looking for new neighborhoods, we find places where the streets are narrower and we can sprawl in grassy parks. We walk up and down the Canal St.-Martin and over its little bridges. We try speaking only French to each other for hours at a time. We have favorite restaurants and museums—not anything as staid as the Louvre, but we love the Palais de Tokyo, which is walking distance from our apartment, and rotates through exhibits of Takashi Murakami and Vanessa Beecroft. Like all couples, we have dozens of little pacts, spoken and unspoken, that let us function, from closet space—he needs more than I do for his bespoke suits—to the iron-clad understanding that I will never again do anything like I did when I emailed Justin.

As with all couples, our internal workings are a mystery to outsiders. We repeat the same fights but still call each other five times a day. For a while we're each other's sole confidants. Dominic tells me the minutiae of his job, and says that I could walk into his office and do it better. I have him read all my first drafts,
and wonder if he might be the more talented writer. We're intertwined in our own bubble, capable of spending days on end, oneon-one. Dominic doesn't have the hobnobbing sociability of many of his colleagues, but he has a natural tendency to make peace. I still vividly remember my chaos from before I met him, and how I almost torpedoed our partnership with my imaginary lover, and so I embrace our placid life.

It's completely different from my life in Seattle. In objective, physical terms, our Paris apartment is the most beautiful place either of us has ever lived or—as we've already accepted—will live, whereas Seattle was the opposite. Now, among diplomats and journalists and expats, I feel like I'm with peers, while in Seattle I didn't. Now I'm guarded, evaluating every word for possible consequence, whereas back then I expressed every other thought and whim. Stu loved me in a way that Dominic never will.

And yet some things are the same. I look around and wonder how I got here. Every morning I wake up with the same question on my mind: Why does my situation, of living in a beautiful apartment with my boyfriend, spending my days writing, feel like a prison sentence? Why has the old desire to escape—that I felt in my parents' home in high school, and later living with Stu in Seattle, and later still as I tried to imagine a future with Paul, come back to me? It's different this time: Now I'm afraid of throwing grenades into the middle of a calm life, whereas before I did so without a second thought. My peace with Dominic is fragile, but I need it. I think of Houdini again, and his back-and-forth between self-entrapment and escape. This time I've compressed the two together, so that I want both things at once. My wanderlust hovers, repressed, under the surface, while I both desire and fear its potential consequences.

chapter thirty-two

O
nce again, I'm living a
subterranean life. I think of Raphael, from Peru, and wonder if he's living in Paris. I haven't dared try to find out, though I've run through scenarios of what would happen if I ran into him in the Metro. Aside from the fact that I don't really trust myself, Dominic's wariness over any ex-lover/friend would be too much of a hassle. Once, though, I'm listening to RFI, Radio France Internationale, at my desk, and I hear a deep-voiced dispatch from the Middle East. At the end, the Paris news anchor says the reporter's name: “That was Raphael Denon reporting from Gaza.” I'm electrified, thinking of Peru, but I don't do anything; I don't try to reach out.

Instead, I do the thing that most predictably lets me know I'm unhappy. I start calling Justin again. He now has a girlfriend, a Russian emigrée, a businesswoman-turned-painter whom he obviously admires. Mostly he listens and counsels me like a friend, and it's a huge relief to talk to him. It's like getting in touch with an earlier self, someone blithe and heedless and not worried about the future. There's not much romance in the things we say. He seems to know that I just need a voice on the other end of the phone, one that flirts a little and praises safely from a distance, making me feel desired without upsetting the status quo. Dominic desires me, or at least
we fuck two or three times a week, but it's somehow not enough to make me feel wanted. There's an additional kick to my conversations with Justin: As I delete the previous-caller list from the phone, there's the frisson of getting caught. Some people like physical risk. I court the possibility of blowing everything up.

I know that I'm just thinking about other men because they symbolize escape. But even now that I've identified my pathology, I'm not sure what to do. I'm not sure if I should fight it or give in. If I stay, am I just trying for something that's not going to work anyway? If I leave, am I doing the right thing, making a strike for healthy independence—or am I just doing what I've always done?

I try to dismiss my unhappiness in Paris as merely an external problem. I tell myself that it's the dullness of the city, the Sunday closures, the insufferable correctness of the place, anything but me. Surely I can be loyal to Dominic, and my mood will perk up when we hit a more challenging post. But I feel that old restless desire for travel and change, and it's tied up intimately with sex. One night I sit on the edge of our bed and let myself think about lifetime fidelity, a subject that, in one-day-at-a-time-alcoholic style, I usually avoid dwelling on. The lamp on my side of the bed is on, the light splashing across the parquet of the walk-in closet. Dominic is in there hanging his clothes, reviewing his silk ties for the next day. I hope, as I always do, that he'll choose one of the ones I gave him. But simultaneous with that cozy loyal wish is something else. I imagine having sex with this one man for the rest of my life. And suddenly I have tears in my eyes. It would be like banning myself from ever seeing another country.

In movies about male infidelity—take, say, Woody Allen's oeuvre—I always find myself sympathizing with the male protagonist. Lee Simon, the character played by Kenneth Branaugh in
Celebrity,
is mocked as a silly screw-up as he follows his libido and thereby messes up his and everyone else's life. And yet I understand how you might want desperately to throw over safety and security, and let yourself be consumed by new love. Female cinematic adulterers are harder to identify with, because they tend to get punished severely. (Thelma and Louise drive off a cliff; Emily in
A Perfect Murder
sees her husband and her lover die; Connie in
Unfaithful
sees her lover die; et cetera.) But there are other reasons I side with the cheaters. For one, unlike women of an earlier era, I wasn't raised to subordinate my desires to the needs of others. Being an adulterer means selfishly putting one's own desires first, and maybe this is the real sin women are committing when they stray. For another, I have sympathy for Lee Simon and the others because I know that the desire to escape isn't simple or trite. It comes out of a profound and painful confusion over life's most important question: What will make me happy?

Sitting there on the bed, I know for certain that I can't do it. By which I don't mean to suggest that Dominic could be forever committed and faithful—that's never been clear. In fact, his continued ambivalence is probably one of the things that's kept me with him this long, since it never threatened to ensnare me in the way of true love.

Now, though, I have to admit that his ambivalence is neither here nor there. I can't do this thing I'm pretending to do, this tranquil domesticity, this fidelity. At least not with him. But my tears are because I don't know if I can do it with anyone.

chapter thirty-three

W
e drive from Rome up to
the rolling Umbrian countryside, and at the end of a long driveway, off a narrow rural road, find the two-story house with patios and a terra-cotta roof. There are barley fields beyond the swimming pool and the neatly mowed lawn, making the place just rustic enough to earn the label “farmhouse” without the presence of actual mud or manure. Friends from New York, who are more Dominic's friends than mine, have invited us and others to share it for a week.

There's not much to do right here at the house. You could go running along the rural roads through sunflower and lavender fields, or play tennis a couple of miles away. It's a ten-minute drive to the town of Todi, where the steep, cobblestoned streets are scattered with salumerias, gelaterias, and restaurants. But really this vacation was conceived of as a big, amicable hang-out. There's a pool table in the den, and a big kitchen for group cooking. We're supposed to enjoy talking to our friends, relaxing by the pool with a book, or taking group excursions to hilltop towns like Spoleto. We're five couples. I know and like the couple who organized the rental, Natalie and Gil, and I've hung out with Dominic's best friend, Jack, and his girlfriend, Melinda, but the others I've never met.

I like the idea of a big group. I like to talk and cook, and I've
brought books that I've been meaning to read. Natalie leads dinner preparation most days, and I help, and we all sit down to eat together at a long wooden table.

It should be charming and delightful, but it's not. I try to figure out why we're failing to bond. One woman is ill with some kind of food poisoning, so we don't see much of her. I find one of the men abrasive. But mostly we lack group chemistry. I think it's because we're all couples in the early stages of coupledom, ranging from Natalie and Gil, who've been married for five years, to Ben and Paola, who met a few months ago in Brazil and can only see each other now and then because she can't get a visa to visit him in New York. Paola seems more anxious about this than Ben. With the possible exception of Natalie and Gil, we're couples who are still clinging to each other, a little ill at ease. No one can flirt. We can't gossip about ourselves. Positive news about one's relationship is safe to share with the group, but I'm not close enough to anyone here to talk about what's getting me down. We can't declaim drunkenly on the nature of love, or the general nature of humanity, because that too could veer into the relationship-impacting zone. Our shared intellectual interests seem to be few. That leaves careers and pop culture, and several of our housemates have dull-sounding jobs that they're no more interested in talking about than I am in listening to them talk about. It's not much to get through a week. One night the women are all at the wrought-iron patio table, and Melinda tells us about how wonderfully things are going between her and Jack, how his mother loves her, and how she expects a marriage proposal soon. This makes both Paola and I depressed, for different reasons.

Jack and Melinda are excited about the midweek excursion they've planned to Florence, which is a few hours away by car. Amid the city's masterpieces, the Uffizi Gallery is supposed to be
so mesmerizing that it made the French writer Stendhal fall to his knees and nearly pass out. An Italian psychiatrist later coined the term “Stendhal Syndrome” to describe the condition afflicting those overwhelmed by Florentine beauty. The city is a can't-miss, as the guidebooks would say. Not only that, but Jack and Melinda have arranged for a special guide, an art historian, to take them around. Neither Dominic nor I have ever been to Florence, and they invite us to come along.

We don't want to go. I know that if there's one crucible of Western art I should see—that I should want to see—it's this. But it's not even an internal debate. We can't muster the slightest interest.

My reaction to the prospect of Florence gives me stark evidence that something has changed. Once I would have hauled myself five hours across the desert to see a historically significant pile of rock. Even when I lost some of my interest in sightseeing per se, of the need to check off sanctioned destinations, I still loved new cities and art museums. In high school I took a class called Western Civilization, where we studied all the great works of the Renaissance, and I would have given anything to fly to Florence right then. I've even had Stendhal Syndrome in other cities. As a teenager in the east wing of Washington's National Gallery of Art, walking among the Picassos and Pollocks for the first time, I kept feeling weak in the knees and finally had to sit down in the ladies' room. After visiting the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul I couldn't talk.

Travel is life-changing. That's the promise made by a thousand websites and magazines, by philosophers and writers down the ages. Mark Twain said it was fatal to prejudice, and Thomas Jefferson said it made you wise. Anais Nin observed that “we travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.” It's all true. Self-transformation is what I sought and what I found.

You go out into the world a sponge, and everything blows you away—the first palm tree, the first laundry line strung over desertyellow dust. Now, though, I've absorbed too much. I know that Florence won't have any impact. Zip. I know this because nothing does anymore. Not the Tuileries, not the cathedral at Chartres. They're admirable and beautiful, but they slide right out of my consciousness, and I start wondering what to have for dinner. Dominic, I think, feels something similar. Of course he does—we live in Paris. And we've both lived in New York, and I've lived in Egypt and Pakistan and Australia, and he's been in Iraq and Yemen and Tennessee. And the list goes on. We're afflicted by Stendhal Syndrome in reverse. Stendhal was overwhelmed, but nothing can do that to us.

We just want to go to the beach. On the day the others go to Florence, we decide to drive to Rimini. It takes hours to get there on the squiggly roads, and we get stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic. Rimini is nothing special. Umbrellas and lounge chairs are available for rent on the beach, packed closely together to accommodate the crowds. The sea is opaque in the glare of the sun. The groups of children, parents, and potato-shaped grandparents remind me of the beach in Moraira.